Seven Minutes
by bowtruckles
Summary: On the night before his birthday, Ron tells Hermione about what almost happened on the night he was born.


A/N: I wrote this for Ron's birthday and it was originally posted on Tumblr - it's just a little bit of fluff based on a headcanon that I've had for a while about him, but I hope you enjoy it!

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"I wish this wasn't such a short month," Hermione mumbled under her breath as her quill scratched furiously across the parchment before her. "All I need is a day, just one more day, and I can get this done."

Ron watched from across their kitchen table as she set down her quill and raked her fingers through her hair before tying it into a fluffy knot at the top of her head. This, paired with her pajamas that consisted entirely of his old clothes, gave her the impression of being even more frazzled, and Ron bit down hard on his bottom lip to keep from all-out grinning at her.

"Yeah, why is it such a short month?" he wondered aloud, more to empathize with her than anything else.

"It actually has to do with the Roman calendar," Hermione replied automatically, not looking up from her work. "Originally, the year only had ten months, but-"

"I wasn't really asking," chuckled Ron, though he reckoned he should have known, nearly three years into this relationship, that she would start explaining anyway.

"Oh." Hermione dipped the point of her quill into an inkwell, frowning as errant drops splattered onto the table. Wordlessly, Ron picked up his wand and tapped the spots to clear them.

"Look, we don't have do anything tomorrow," Ron said, "I know you've got a deadline-"

"No, no, I want to," Hermione replied, albeit distractedly, flipping through her pages of research on illness recovery stages in house elves. "It's your birthday, we can't do nothing."

"We'll just do something some other day, it's not a big deal. I'd rather see the elves get paid sick leave," he said with a vague gesture toward her work.

"Would you really?"

"Yeah. I would."

He had long ago passed the point of caring about his own birthday (though he loved having an excuse to splash out for Hermione on hers). After a stretch of fairly pitiful ones - nearly dying on his seventeenth, living in a tent on his eighteenth, bogged down by Auror training and desperately missing Hermione on his nineteenth - he had determined that it wasn't anything worth making a fuss over. It wasn't as if he had particularly done anything to earn it, anyway. Everyone had one, and he could live with it if his went largely unacknowledged.

Hermione glanced up at Ron, her eyes narrowing momentarily, and then she turned another page in her research and sighed. "I wish I still had a Time Turner," she said as she returned her quill to her parchment.

"No," Ron said at once. "No, no, I will not watch you go through that again."

"It's just too bad it's not Leap Day," she added, tucking a misbehaving curl behind her ear. When it sprang free, Ron reached out and made his own attempt. "I could really use the extra day."

"You know I was almost born on Leap Day?" Ron found himself saying, resting his chin in his palm as he shamelessly gazed at her. He knew he had to be irritating her - he had been sat here, nothing but a distraction, for a good hour or so - but he liked watching her work, and he knew she secretly enjoyed this little dynamic between them.

"Missed it by a day?"

"Missed it by seven minutes," Ron clarified.

He had heard the story growing up a million times over as a child, typically during his mum's annual reminiscence of the day he came into the world, but judging by the way Hermione's head popped up, he had never bothered passing it along to anyone else.

"Really?"

"Yeah, my mum loves that story, how all day she thought she was getting a Leap Day baby and then, y'know, she didn't. It used be one of those things, actually - well. Anyway."

Hermione's eyes pierced into him. "No, what?"

"S'nothin'," he shrugged, rising from his seat and kissing her on the cheek as he walked toward the kitchen. "What do you want for dinner? I'll cook."

But Hermione had turned on her seat to face him, even as he'd begun searching through the cupboards for inspiration.

"Ron," she said suspiciously, "what were you going to say?"

"Nothing," he repeated, nonchalant as he knelt down to fetch a saucepan. "How do you feel about pasta?"

"No, it was definitely _something_ -"

Ron straightened up to see that she had abandoned her work entirely. "Your law isn't gonna write itself, you know-" The scowl on her face gave him pause; his offhand comment had clearly affected her. "It's just something I used to think when I was younger, that I don't anymore."

"Which was?"

Letting out a slow, heavy breath through his lips, Ron leaned back against the work surface. Classic Hermione - once she had something in her head, she never let it go. And he loved her for it, he really did, but she still drove him mad sometimes.

"It's just, when I was a kid, I used to think…" He pursed his lips, unsure how to word this, because the version of him who had thought these things almost didn't exist anymore. "I thought that when I was born, my parents were hoping for a girl - the first girl in seven generations - and that I'd be born on Leap Day, and instead… y'know, all they got was a boy born in March. And it made me think that I was almost special, I was so close to being special… but then I wasn't."

Hermione looked as though all of the air in her lungs had been stolen from her. Mouth slightly agape, eyes wide, she gawked at him, sadness slowly crossing her face.

"I don't - it's just stupid kid stuff," he hastened to reassure her. "Just something I used to think, that I wished I could be born that day so that people'd think I, I dunno, mattered or something." At Hermione's obvious disbelief, he felt compelled to repeat his new refrain: "It's not a big deal."

And then he ducked down behind the cupboard again, recovering a large steel pot from its depths. He hadn't thought about this in ages, and he certainly hadn't wanted to concern Hermione with it, because he had wished for a lot of asinine things in his youth - that he could be an only child, that he could receive even a sliver of the attention that Harry had, that the bossy, bushy-haired girl in his classes would just go away - and he had only wound up thankful when they hadn't come true.

When he stood upright again, he saw Hermione approaching, her eyes filled a fierce, determined look that he had long come to associate with a social injustice crusade.

"Just so we're clear," she stated, pulling the pot from his hands and setting it on the stove so she could stand directly in front of him, "you have always mattered to me."

Evidently, it made no difference how long they were together, or that he knew, without a shadow of a doubt, that she loved him. Words like that, spoken with such conviction, never failed to stun him, and though he felt the old impulse to deflect them with his favorite defense mechanism - humor - he resisted.

"Hermione, you really don't-"

"And just so we're clear," she pressed on, forming each syllable slowly, carefully, "I don't care when or how it happened, I'm just so glad you were born at all. Every day."

The corners of Ron's lips twitched upwards, and for a moment he fought it, not wanting to be the sort of person who basked in his own importance - but then, was it so bad if he did? That was sort of the point of one's birthday, anyway, wasn't it?

"Every day, huh?" he asked, letting himself grin as he set his hands on her waist.

"Of course," she smiled back, and as she stood on her toes to bring herself closer to him, he gripped her sides and boosted her up to sit on the work surface.

"So then…" He stood between her knees, hands on her thighs, and found her meeting him halfway for a light kiss. "Then I reckon it doesn't matter when we start celebrating, does it?"

She laughed, cupping his face in her hands, her fingers grazing over the copper stubble dotting his jaw, and pulled him down to press her lips more firmly to his.

"Doesn't matter at all."

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 _Thanks for reading! Please review :)_


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